August 03, 2009

In the last week or so, I've missed two birthdays: a friend's and one of my niece's. And then I missed the Quest's birthday, too, which was actually last Thursday. This is what happens when you come back from vacation. I know I should re-seal the kitchen sink and organize my junk drawer, but all I feel like doing is trolling scrapbooking sites, quite as if I don't have a growing list of To-Do's that just aren't getting done.

But you know, it's kind of nice to kick back with a tall glass of ice tea and plan a few layouts, in-between doling out treat and tummy rubs to the kittens. When life starts to feel like a joyless trudge through endless responsibilities, it's time to crack out the scrabble board, grab a leash or the phone, dig out the rollerblades, the fishing gear, the croquet set, the watercolors or embroidery floss, and let yourself have a little fun, if just for a little while.

I'm gonna take my own advice and allow for a little more fun to slip into my life. I think a some R & R is just the ticket for reconnecting to so many things--whether work or dreams, goals or plans--with a renewed sense of purpose and vigor. And so, for a while at least, I'm going to be cutting back a bit on my posts, aiming for 3-5 posts a week rather than my (pre-vacation) usual of 6-7. I still have a list of, oh, 732 topics to address here on the Quest. It might just take me a little longer to get to them all.

June 30, 2009

For those of you who've never heard of Cappadoccia, it's a region in the middle of Turkey and happens to be the first leg of our vacation to celebrate our 20th anniversary. My plan a few weeks ago was that if I could just write two posts a day on the weekends and another couple extra posts during the week, I'd have my posts all lined up to go for the entire 2+ weeks we'd be gone, and thus the Quest would not be interrupted by Vacation Catatonia, which is what happens when you eat too much baklava. Of course, because I'm not yet Really Organized but still an Organization Wannabe, I did not write the extra posts. I then imagined I could write my posts, um, the day I left, nevermind that I had to work half the day and hadn't yet started packing all that much. Or the airplane! I could write on the airplane! Or; in the place we are staying in Cappadoccia! Notice I did not say "the hotel we are staying at in Cappadoccia" because we are not staying in a hotel; we are staying in a cave. I kid you not. It is a very nice cave, but a cave nevertheless. But surely caves carved out of volcanic rock in the middle of Turkey have wi-fi, right?

Above: home sweet cave.

So, folks, I miscalculate a little, and for that I apologize. I do, however, have a ton of great topics for the Quest, some of which are new takes on old favorites and some that we've never before visited, so there should be a lot of great content this summer to look forward to when we return mid-July. In the meantime, I'll try to log on when I can to share O-Quest insights or maybe a few vacation pix and stories, assuming, of course, that Vacation Catatonia doesn't set in. But I don't know if I'll be able to avoid it; the baklava here is awfully good.

April 16, 2009

A few years ago, the division of the company I work for moved from one suburb to another, and so my manager at the time called a meeting to announce the office assignments. The good news, she said, is that we'd get a real office with a door and everything. This was just wildly exciting, as we'd all previously worked in cubes. The (semi) bad news was that the offices were semi-private, meaning there'd be two per office. Before the manager had finished pairing us off, the man assigned to share the office space with me was shaking his head while mouthing "no, no, no."

"Is there a problem?" the manager asked my office mate, who has indicated he'd like to be called Gustavo, or, alternately, Rinaldo, in this blog. He's promised if I do so, he might take before-and-after pictures of his study makeover and let me post them on the Quest. So Rinaldo or Gustavo it is.

"I'm allergic to cats," Gustavo said in answer to the manager.

The manager leveled her gaze at him and waited. "So?" she finally said.

"She. Has. A. Cat," he said, emphasizing each word by raising and lowering his eyebrows.

The manager's expression didn't change. The manager was seated to my right, Gustavo to the left; I was in-between the two. Gustavo, for his part continued staring at my manager in return, coupled with a strange head-tilt in my direction. At first I thought he might have a creak in his neck, but then I realized there was a deliberate direction to the thrust of his head, which I followed in spite of myself. And that's when I saw it: an enormous, knotted tangle of downy white cat fur, wedged in my crotch.

I plucked the tangle from its ignoble position and held it in front of me, unsure what to do with it. Gustavo stared at it. My manager stared at it. Across the table, another colleague stared at it. For a long moment, it was as if time itself had stopped so we all, my colleaguess, manager, and I, might examine this artifact from Mau-Mau Kitty, our long-haired, Maine Coon cat. "We'll get her a lint brush," my manager said then.

Look at that furry tummy!

After Mau-Mau Kitty passed on our bed last June, I washed the sheets. As always, little balls of fur covered the freshly-cleaned sheets, requiring an extensive plucking process to (more or less) remove all the fur-balls. The next time I washed the sheets, I noticed that there wasn't nearly as much fur. The third time I washed the sheets, there was virtually none. By this time, we'd adopted the kittens, but being relatively short-haired, combined they didn't shed a fraction of what Mau-Mau Kitty had. The day I realized this, I cried and cried, because I realized anew that Mau-Mau was gone. Even the physical evidence of his existence--the ubiquitous cat dander floating in the air--was slowly disappearing. It made me very sad.

Every once in a while, when I vacuum under the bed or move a piece of furniture, I come across a bit of downy white fur. "Kitty tumbleweeds" is what Alpay calls them. Alpay has kept a tangle or two, which he keeps on his desk as a kind of talisman.

A few weeks ago, I came home from work and found a little knot not under but on the bed. And stranger still: it wasn't white, but a darkish brown. And I realized that it came from Snapdragon. "Look!" I said showing Alpay. "A kitty tumbleweed!" Alpay said. We were excited and very proud. Since then, I've noticed more tumbleweeds: on the chair in my study, on the floor by the bed. When I washed the sheets, I had to once again pluck fur balls off it, as I've done for the past 19 years. Gustavo may not be happy about it, but really, I'm delighted. What's a home without a little cat fur?

December 26, 2008

Okay, I confess: I am not one of those people who takes down the tree promptly after Christmas. I do have a bit of an excuse: since Alpay and I usually exchange gifts on New Year's day, the tree obviously has to do its holiday duty until then. Taking it down on January 2 is out of the question; it just seems a little rash. Actually, the whole first week of January seems a little premature for tree dismantling. If there's one month you could use some holiday cheer, it's January. The second week of January could conceivably be the perfect time to take it down, but by then I have usually accustomed myself to its presence, and since we buy a freshly-cut tree every year, why not get our money's worth out of it?

Finally, some time around the Super Bowl, I'm ready to imagine life without pine needles crunching underfoot. The tree, stripped of all dignity at this point, retaliates by morphing from plant to weapon. The needles that are left are both razor-edged and determined. I wear long sleeves and heavy-duty leather gloves when taking the ornaments off, and have bandages and Bactine ready.

This year, of course, is going to be different. I hereby pledge to take the tree down before the third week of January. Probably the second week. Maybe even next weekend! Well, I'll consider it, anyway. Don't want to make any rash promises.

December 17, 2008

When I started looking into organizers, one of the things I realized right away is that the allure of perfectly typed data, a la Palm Pilot or online organizers, no longer interests me. There's something about handwriting--quirky, immediate, gratifyingly low-tech--that I find appealing.

And so in the midst of researching Blackberries and project matrices, Productivity-this and Life-Plan-that, I became mesmerized by To-Do List, a blog so funny, so strange and compelling, that I knew I'd end up writing about it here. To-Do List is the brainchild of Sasha Cagen, who collects other people's lists. "Resolve cat thing," is an item I could particularly relate to on one such list that made it into Sasha's recently published book, To-Do List: From Buying Milk to Finding a Soul Mate, What Our Lists Reveal About Us. "Credit card thing" and "Diskette thing" also make the aforementioned list, which the anonymous list-maker titled, "Niggling things to do." In the absence of such titles, Sasha takes the liberty of naming the lists as appropriate: the "Vigorously Crossed Off List" and "Female MBA Searches for Male Doc," both found in the blog's archives, are two of my favorites ("Get sick more often" and "Crash MD Assoc. parties" are two items on the latter list).

"December is truly the month for making lists," Sasha writes in her most recent blog entry, noting that it's "only to be outdone by the more contemplative and ambitious listyness of January." If you need a break or just want to have a little fun, consider putting a visit to Sasha's site at the top of a list of your own.

December 05, 2008

The Stash-n-Dash post I wrote the other day was really a reminder to myself. With all the cookie excitement in the last couple weeks, the kitchen actually looks pretty darn good--having a small kitchen actually forces me to keep things up, otherwise I wouldn't have the space to work. And since the area is so small, it doesn't take that long to clean up. So I'm good on the kitchen front. And the living room isn't exactly terrible. The bedroom could be better. The guest bath is sort of an embarrassment. As for the rest of the place: it's pretty much gone to hell in a handbasket.

I could, at this very moment, grab a bucket and the mop and get at least one chore out of the way before going to bed tonight, but I'd much rather speculate as to why a handbasket is the vehicle of choice for going to hell. What could it possibly offer, aside from certain alliterative qualities? But then why not go to hell on a Harley? Or in a Honda? What exactly is a "handbasket" anyway, and how does it differ from the garden-variety baskets you get at places like Pier One and World Market? Do you get to choose your own handbasket, or is that part of the punishment--to get stuck with some god-forsaken monstrosity that doesn't even have a liner? Or worse: a plaid liner. With a clashing bow. And your name embroidered on it.

Once you get to hell, can you get rid of the handbasket already? Or are you stuck with it forever, like a bad nose job? And what if you get a second chance? You never hear of anyone getting out of hell in a handbasket. This seems to imply a rather limiting, one-way quality regarding the navigational feature of handbaskets. What's up with that? Can't you upgrade to a two-way model, just in case? Or have I just identified a potentially huge market? Because let's face it, it's easy to let things go. But don't we all deserve a little redemption? Don't we--and our homes--deserve a second chance?

December 02, 2008

It's a fact of life: every office has a Designated Neatnik. The DN in our office is Stacy, whose desk looks like a Pottery Barn ad, complete with color-coordinated accessories and just enough files artfully arrayed to look convincing.

A while back Stacy shared with me her favorite card, which basically sums up her life view. I pleaded with her to scan it so I could include it here, and she kindly obliged.

October 20, 2008

I 'm not sure if "Bracketology" is actually a word or not; dictionary.com doesn't list it, although Wikipedia does, defining it as "the process of predicting the field of the NCAA Basketball Tournament." Whatever. As Mark Reiter and Richard Sandomir note in their book, The Enlightened Bracketologist, you can use the concept to find the "final four of anything,", including but not limited to emoticons, Bob Dylan cover songs, inventions, film deaths, red wines, Yiddish phrases, and marital arguments. For our purposes, we can use it to prioritize the items on our to-do lists, or to figure out what to do when we happen to find a few unscheduled hours at our disposal. Looks like shopping wins!

August 22, 2008

At risk of belaboring the obvious, everyone knows there’s a Container Store in heaven; what I worry about is whether or not there is one in purgatory, you know, just in case. Generally I try to maintain a positive attitude about these things, but it’s important to be practical. If by chance I miss the direct flight to paradise, at least I want to make sure I have access to cedar-scented shoe trees. I may have Supreme Paper Mess, but my shoes are very organized and I want to keep them that way.

It’s occurred to me that the difference between heaven and purgatory may not be whether or not there is a Container Store, but what store location the afterlife Container Store is modeled on. I hope the afterlife Container Store is just like the one on North Avenue, with the kitchen supplies to the right and the closet supplies to the left, just like it’s supposed to be. I’ve been to Container Stores in other cities and haven’t been able to find the spice jars or drawer doublers, which is just wrong.

Before we bought our place in Chicago, we considered moving to Seattle to be near my family. Had I known at the time that the only Container Store in the entire state of Washington is in Bellevue Square, and that the Bellevue Square Container Store has file boxes where the kitchen supplies are supposed to be, we could have saved a lot of time and anguish. I love my family and I love the Pacific Northwest, but while I’m still living, I’m not ready to trade down my North Avenue Container Store just yet.